“The lady will need you,” I hissed at Viv, gripping her nerveless hand till I ground the bones together. “She needs us all.”
That might have helped. There was a little jerk from Viv’s hand, a little resistance; and I winced, for Lance closed down hard on mine. My lady and Griffin screamed—we hit, ground with a sound like someone was shredding the Maid’s metal body, and our soft bodies hit the restraints as the ship’s mass stopped a little before that of our poor flesh. I blanked half an instant, came out of it realizing pain, and that somehow we had not been going as fast as I feared a ship might in this place (which estimate ranged past Cand posed interesting physics for collision) or what we had hit was going the same general direction as we were, at an angle. Mass, I thought, if that had any meaning in this place/time ... a monstrous mass, to have pulled us into it, if that was what it had done. Our motion had not stopped in collision. The noise had not. We grated, hit, hung, grated, a shock that seemed to tear my heart and stomach loose.
“We’re up against it,” Modred’s cool voice came to me. “We’d better grapple or we’ll go on with this instability.”
Instability.A groaning and scraping, and a horrifying series of jolts, as if we were being dragged across something. The Maidshifted again, her dragging force of engines like a hand pushing us.
Clang and thump. I heard the grapples lock and felt the whole ship steady, a slow suspicion of stable Gthat crawled through the clothes I wore and settled my hair down and caressed my abused joints and stomach and said that there was indeed up and down again. It was a kilo or so light, but we had G. Whatever we were fixed to had spin and we had gotten our right orientation to it.
The crew was still exchanging quiet information, doing a shutdown, no cheers, no exuberance in their manner. That huge main screen cleared again, to show us ruby-spotted blackness and our own battered nose with the grapples locked onto something. Strong floods were playing from our hull onto the surface we faced, a green, pitted surface which was flaring with colors into the violets and dotted with little instabilities like black stars. It made me sick to look at it; but it was indeed our nose probe, badly abraded and with stuff coming out of it like trailing cable or black snakes, and there was our grapple locked into something that looked like metal wreckage. The lights swung further and it was wreckage, all right, some other ship all dark and scarred and crumpled. The lights and camera kept traveling and there was still another ship, of some delicate kind I had never imagined. It was dark too, like spiderweb in silhouette, twisted wreckage at its heart with its filament guts hanging out into the red measled void.
My lady Dela swore and wept, a throaty, loud sound in the stillness about us now. She freed herself of the restraints and crossed the deck to Gawain and Lynn, and Griffin came at her heels. I loosed myself, and Lance did, while Dela leaned there on the back of Gawain’s chair, looking up at the screen in terror. Griffin set his big hands on her shoulders. “Keep trying,” Griffin asked of the crew, who kept the beam and the cameras moving, turning up more sights as desolate. Aft, through the silhouette of the Maid’s raking vanes, there was far perspective, chaos-stuff with violet tints into the red. More wreckage then. The cameras stopped. “There,” Modred said. “There.”
It was a curve, lit in the queasy flarings, a vast sweep, a symmetry in the wreckage, as if the thing we were fixed to were some vast ring. Ship bodies were gathered to it like parasites, like fungus growth, with red and black beyond, and the wrecks themselves all spotted with holes as if they were eaten up with acid light illusion of the chaos-stuff, or something showing through their metal wounds, like glowing blood.
“Whatever we’ve hit,” Percy said quietly, “a lot have gone before us. It’s some large mass, maybe a station, maybe a huge ship—once. Old ... old. Others might fall through the pile into us the same way we’ve hit them.”
“Then get us out of here,” my lady said. “Get us out!”
Gawain and Lynette stirred in their seats. Wayne powered his about to look up at her. “My lady Dela, it’s not possible.” He spoke with the stillest patience. “We can wallow about the surface, batter ourselves into junk against it. If we loose those grapples we’ll do that.”
I thought she would hit him. She lifted her hand. It fell. “Well, what are you going to do?”
Gawain had no answer. Griffin set his hands on my lady’s arms, just stood there. I looked at Lance and he was white; I looked at Vivien and she plainly blanked, standing vacant-eyed in her restraints. I undid them, patted her face hard until I got a flicker in her eyes, put my arms about her and held her. She wrapped her arms about me and held on.
“The hull is sound,” Modred said. “Our only breach is G-34. I’ve sealed that compartment.”
“Get us out of here,” Dela said. “Fix what’s wrong with us and get us out of here, you hear that? You find out how to move in this stuff and get us away.”
The crew slowly stopped their operations, confronted with an impossibility. I held to Viv, and Lance just stood there, his hand clenched on one of the safety holds. I felt a profound cold, as if it were our shared fault, this disaster. We had failed and the Maidwas damaged—more than damaged. All the crew’s skill, that had stopped our falling, that had docked us here neatly as if it was Brahmani Station ... in this terrible, terrible place....
“We’re fixed here,” Lynette said. “There’s no way. There’s no repair that can make the engines work against this. The Maidwon’t move again. Can’t.”
There was stark silence, from us, from Dela, no sound at all over the ship but the fans and the necessary machinery.
“How long will we survive?” Griffin asked. He kept his steadying hold on my lady. His handsome face was less arrogant than I had ever seen it; and he came up with the only sensible question. “What’s a reasonable estimate?”
“No immediate difficulty,” Gawain said. He unfastened his restraints and stood up, jerking his head so that his long hair fell behind his shoulders. “Modred?”
“The ship is virtually intact,” Modred said. “We’re not faced with shutdown. The lifesupport and recycling will go on operating. Our food is sufficient for several years. And for the percentage of inefficiency in the recycling, there are emergency supplies, frozen cultures, hydroponics. It should be indefinite.”
“You’re talking about living here,” Dela said in a faint voice.
“Yes, my lady.”
“In this?”
Modred turned back to his boards, without answer.
Dela stood there a moment, slowly brought her hands up in front of her lips. “Well,” she said in a tremulous voice, with a sudden pivot and look at Griffin, at all of us. “Well, so we do what we can, don’t we?” She looked at the crew. “Who knows anything about the hydroponics?”
“There’s a training tape,” Percy said, “in library. It’s a complicated operation. When the ship is secured—”
“I can do that.” Vivien stirred at my side, muscles tensing. “Lady Dela, I’ll do that.”
Dela looked at her, waved her hand. “See to it.” Viv shivered, with what joy Dela surely had no concept. Sniffed and straightened her back. Dela paced the deck, distracted, with that look in her eyes—panic. It was surely panic. She laughed a faint and brittle laugh and came back and laced her fingers into Griffin’s hand. “So we make the best of it,” she said, looking up at him. “You and I.”
He stood looking at the screens and the horror outside, while my lady Dela put her arms about him. Maybe she was building her fantasies back again, but it was a different look I saw on Griffin’s face, which was not resigned, which was set in a kind of desperation. My jaw still ached where he had hit me in his panic, and I was afraid of this man as I would have been afraid of one of my own kind who had had such a lapse—for which one of usmight have been put down. But born-men were entitled to stupidities, and to be forgiven for them.